Or rather, the white coach back in England.
Before we move on to Suffolk let's take a look at the amazing white horses of Wiltshire.
We passed the Cherhill horse several times as we traveled from our home base in Devizes to gardens around the region.
The Wiltshire Countryside is famous for its white horse chalk hill figures. It is thought that there have been 13 white horses in existence in Wiltshire, but only 8 are still visible today.
Cut in 1780 by Dr. Christopher Alsop (or the mad doctor as he was known locally) the Cherhill, or Oldbury, white horse measures 129ft by 142ft and is best viewed from the main A4 road between Calne and Beckhampton.
Dr Alsop is supposed to have shouted his instructions from the village by megaphone to the workman on the Cherhill Down, who planted white flags to mark the outline.
A unique attraction of the Cherhill horse was its eye. Measuring four feet in diameter, Aslop filled the eye with glass bottles embedded into the turf face down. This gave the effect that the eye was shimmering when the sun hit it and could be seen for miles around. By 1872 all the bottles had been stolen by tourists and souvenir hunters. - visitwiltshire.co.uk
For your trivia file: Leucippotomy is the art of carving white horses in chalk upland areas, particularly as practised in southern England.
Unfortunately our route did not pass by the premier example of gigantotomy in England, the Cerne Abbas giant.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
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